Union History

The setting is Boston, Fall of 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a 17-year-old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions.

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on seventeen years of on-the-ground coverage.

Beginning with Charlemagne, the great and educated king who would serve as an inspiration for world leaders from Frederick II to Adolf Hitler, the Holy Roman Empire’s intricate ties with the Roman Catholic Church would provide for plenty of excitement and drama in its early years. However, as the empire staggered through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, it would eventually be forced to declare its allegiance with a new way of thinking: Protestantism.

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

In 1692, it did not pay to be a nonconformist in Salem Village, Massachusetts. This was especially true if the nonconformist just happened to be an elderly, improvised widow. Susannah Martin found this out the hard way. Susannah Martin stood trial, received a conviction, and suffered hanging for bewitching some of the good folk of Salem, Massachusetts and the surrounding area. More than two dozen persons related the crimes Martin committed. It seems that Susannah Martin’s most heinous crime may have been that she had a sense of humor. When she heard the ridiculous accusations made against...

Born to a well-to-do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America's forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand-new US Capitol.

In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols.

The title of Iron Brigade has been given to a number of different US Army brigades over the last century and a half, but it has become almost entirely synonymous with the Civil War soldiers who fought in the brigade for the Army of the Potomac. Also known as the Iron Brigade of the West, Rufus King’s Brigade and the Black Hat Brigade, the Iron Brigade was comprised of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 19th Indiana, Battery B of the 4th US Light Artillery, and later, the 24th Michigan.

America in the antebellum years was a deeply troubled country, divided by partisan gridlock and ideological warfare. The Civil War that followed brought America to the brink of self-destruction. But it also created a new country from the ruins of the old one - bolder and stronger than ever. No event in the war was more destructive, or more important, than William Sherman's legendary march through Georgia - crippling the heart of the South's economy, freeing thousands of slaves, and marking the beginning of a new era.

Drawing on a wealth of previously classified intelligence archives, in multiple countries and languages, it reveals how Western and Eastern governments used spies, sabotage, subversion, and information warfare to battle each other during the conflict that dominated the twentieth century. Far from being a closed historical chapter, however, it shows that conflict's ghosts are still alive.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime—and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey.

Centuries of hunting bloodsuckers courses through my veins. Until I met the powerful vampire Navy SEAL Sam Mason. He’s gorgeous, possessive, deadly, and all mine. My family begs to differ. Since I crossed enemy lines, I’m a disgrace, lost my mind, and committed a sacrilege they want me to atone for. My penance for sleeping with a vampire—lock me away until they can brainwash me. But there are bigger things at play. It’s not me the Aberdeens should worry about. Beneath Sam’s boyish charm lies a predator, a ticking time bomb ready to destroy.

Ginsburg and Amanda Tyler, Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk, bring together RBG's most penetrating opinions - many previously unpublished - sharing details from Justice Ginsburg's family life and long career.

The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.

St. Louis' Bloody Labor Dispute On Saturday, May 5, 1900 at 11:30 p.m., the bombing of the Suburban Line at the Wabash and Sarah Street railroad crossing marked the beginning of the St. Louis Street Car Strike of 1900. Before the strike was over, the streets of St. Louis were a battle ground between rich and poor. Read the graphic details about this explosive time.

In Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia, Garrels crafts an intimate portrait of the nation's heartland. We meet ostentatious mafiosos, upwardly mobile professionals, impassioned activists, scheming taxi drivers with dark secrets, and beleaguered steel workers. We discover surprising subcultures, like the LGBT residents of Chelyablinsk who bravely endure an upsurge in homophobia fueled by Putin's rhetoric of Russian "moral superiority" yet still nurture a vibrant if clandestine community of their own.

Lincoln at Cooper Union explores Lincoln’s most influential and widely reported pre-presidential address—an extraordinary appeal by the western politician to the eastern elite that propelled him toward the Republican nomination for president. Delivered in New York in February 1860, the Cooper Union speech dispelled doubts about Lincoln’s suitability for the presidency and reassured conservatives of his moderation while reaffirming his opposition to slavery to Republican progressives.

The 25-Day Vice-President: Alabama's Rufus King documents the life and times of an often overlooked 19th Century statesman. Born to wealth and privilege in North Carolina, a well-educated King became an attorney before Tarheel voters elected him to serve in the State Legislator and later the U.S. Congress. From that point forward, he devoted his life to public service. King eventually migrated to the rapidly growing Alabama Territory and established himself as a leader in the affluent cotton planter aristocracy. He also helped construct a new city, Selma, which King himself named in honor ...

Anne Applebaum, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer por Gulag y finalista del National Book Award por El Telón de Acero, cuenta en Hambruna roja la reveladora historia de uno de los peores crímenes de la era soviética. En 1929, la gran colectivización puesta en marcha por Stalin forzó a millones de campesinos a entregar sus tierras. El resultado fue una hambruna sin precedentes; al menos cinco millones de personas perecieron entre 1931 y 1934 en la URSS, de los cuales cuatro eran ucranianos.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.